The tragic bombings at the Boston Marathon have provided a rich glimpse into the current condition of our culture.\u00a0 Whenever calamity strikes, the recesses of our hearts are revealed as we reflect and speak about what has occurred.<\/p>\n
Before the identity of the bombers was even determined, CNN ran an opinion piece by Will Cain asking whether human beings are inherently good or inherently bad.\u00a0 That is not the kind of question you discuss while standing in line at a fast-food restaurant.\u00a0 But when bombers purposely attack innocent people, the question of the nature of man is given center stage and rightly so.<\/p>\n
The writer’s conclusion was that while the bombers were possibly evil, the average person in our world certainly isn’t.\u00a0 Quoting actor Patton Oswalt (and isn’t that just like our world to quote an actor when discussing metaphysics), Cain said,<\/p>\n
The vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves alive long ago.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Inherently Sinful.<\/h2>\n
Students of Scripture view the question through a far different lens.\u00a0 “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).\u00a0 While our doctrine of total depravity does not suggest that we are all as bad as we could possibly be (and thank God for that), episodes of violence and brutality cause us to take a long look in the mirror.\u00a0 No, we didn’t set off a bomb to injure another human being, but what about those hurtful words you spoke in anger last week that cut a person down instead of building him up?\u00a0 Jesus called that murder, too (Matthew 5:21-22).\u00a0 Sigh.\u00a0 If we are depending on our own goodness to “wash away the evil doers,” we are in big trouble.\u00a0 We need a cleansing agent far more powerful than that, don’t you think? (Hebrews 9:22, 1 Peter 1:19).<\/p>\n
Amazingly, our world is now even questioning whether the bombers themselves were evil.\u00a0 After Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed, reporters opined that the younger brother Dzhokhav was not responsible for his part in the slayings, because he was simply following the example and teachings of his older brother.\u00a0 As the story continues to unfold, the boys’ uncle is now suggesting that Tamerlan was “brainwashed in America.”\u00a0 In other words, now the bombers themselves aren’t evil, they were simply led astray by the influences of others.<\/p>\n
Exactly what would an individual have to do in this culture before we would look at them and say, “You are an evil person. You were wrong.”?<\/p>\n
And when will anyone stand up and say; “what I did was evil.”\u00a0 No blaming it on other people.\u00a0 No suggesting that I was simply led astray by others. \u00a0“I was wrong.”<\/p>\n
Why is it that our culture has such a hard time labeling evil as evil?\u00a0 Perhaps it is because, if we do so, we know it is a very short walk to having to acknowledge that there are aspects of my own identity that are evil as well.\u00a0 That conclusion would make us admit our need for Someone Else capable of washing away our evil.\u00a0 Someone who could forgive us of our sin and grant us a kind of righteousness we could never conjure up on our own.<\/p>\n
The city of Boston could easily lead us to a wooden cross if we’d simply be honest about who we inherently are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The tragic bombings at the Boston Marathon have provided a rich glimpse into the current condition of our culture.\u00a0 Whenever calamity strikes, the recesses of our hearts are revealed as we reflect and speak about what has occurred. Before the identity of the bombers was even determined, CNN ran an opinion piece by Will Cain… read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":4481,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[11778,11777,11776,11780,11781,11779],"yoast_head":"\nBoston and the Nature of Man - Faith Church Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.faithlafayette.org\/church\/boston-and-the-nature-of-man\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Boston and the Nature of Man - Faith Church Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The tragic bombings at the Boston Marathon have provided a rich glimpse into the current condition of our culture.\u00a0 Whenever calamity strikes, the recesses of our hearts are revealed as we reflect and speak about what has occurred. 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